January 9th, 2021

The Old Testament reading for the first Sunday after the Epiphany of our Lord is so very special. With the traditional emphasis this Sunday on that very special baptism of our Lord, and with that dramatic point, only in this account [Mark 1:10], of the heavens being ‘torn open’, and also having the Spirit present—and there was the water of course—the Old Testament text is the first five verses of the entire Bible [Genesis 1:1-5].

Here is an attempt at a very literal translation of the first two verses of that text:

In beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and empty, and darkness upon face of deep. And Spirit of God hovering upon face of the waters.

So much could be said about these words. So much HAS been said about these words. I remember one seminary teacher saying that more has been written about the two creation accounts in Genesis than the entire book of the Song of Solomon.

Beginnings are important. There is a German proverb that goes this way: ‘Aller Anfang ist schwer.‘ It means that all beginnings are difficult. That may be why the Gospel according to Mark starts out by describing the account as the ‘beginning of the gospel’. Some of the people who heard that account for the first time were having to die for what they believed. They were certainly having a difficult time, but, in that case, the beginning of the gospel was, in a way, an even more difficult thing—and certainly more important.

Now to create everything that exists is, of course, not at all difficult for God. But, in this beginning, it may be difficult to see all the important things that are present within this text.

One of the things that is often forgotten is the importance of numbers with the Hebrew text, the basic language of the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, letters also meant numbers. So, the letters would have a closer connection to numbers than we do in our English language.

The number seven is an important number in both Testaments, and the first verse has seven words, and the second verse has fourteen. This structure would have been helpful to the reader, especially since there were no spaces at all between words in the ancient manuscripts. Imagineifyouwouldhavetoreadthatway! And the importance of the number seven is foundational when it comes to the days of creation. And we even maintain that importance of the number seven when we continue to have seven days in a week. (I have been told that there was a push by the atheists during the Enlightenment to move to a ten-day week, to move society away from such a biblical number as seven; perhaps if they would have suggested a five-day week, that idea would have been more popular!)

It is sometimes difficult to see what is unusual in an Old Testament text, but when the words are compared with the ancient Greek translation of that text, sometimes an aspect of that unusual nature of the text is shown. That ancient translation, also known as the Septuagint, is over two thousand years old, so that text is sometimes a significant step closer than our present-day understanding of the Hebrew text.
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Here are the same verses of the same text, but in the Greek translation, and in another attempt at a literal translation. Notice that there is no mention of a face in this text.

In beginning the God made the heaven and the earth. But the earth was unsightly and unfurnished, and darkness over the deep, and Spirit of God moved over the water.

(It may be helpful, on a side note, to point out that, in the Hebrew text, the word ‘face’ may have served as a hint to the structure of Genesis. It is seen two more times in this first creation account, at the beginning of the fifth and the end of the sixth day, within verses 20 and 29. If these days are laid out, not only as an account of what happened, but also as an outline for the text, the first three days may point to the first eleven chapters, and the second three days, to the rest of the book. And the beginning of the fifth day and the end of the sixth day may connect to the middle and end of that second section, and this ‘middle-and-end’ structure is a significant structural message in this book and in some successive books—see, for example, Genesis 30:2 and 50:19, and Exodus 24:15-18 and 40:34-38. This may also point to the fact that Jesus came in the ‘middle’ of time, and he also promised he would come at the very end of time. Within the book of Genesis and others, there is also the important aspect of the concentric structure—ABCBA—and the word ‘face’ is found in the middle of that structure in the second creation account—see 2:6.)

So, when does the word ‘face’ FINALLY appear in the Greek translation? The first appearance of the word comes within the second creation account that begins near the beginning of chapter two. I will give verses 5 through 7 of that text in an attempt at another very literal translation of the Hebrew:

And all of the shrub of the field not yet it appeared on the earth, and all of the plant of the field not yet it sprung up, for not he sent rain, Yahweh God, on the earth and man there was not to work the ground. But a stream came up from the earth and it watered all the face of the ground. And he formed, Yahweh God, the man dust from the ground, and he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became, the man, to a soul living.

Here are those verses in the Greek, and a very literal translation is what has also been attempted here. And you may notice that the word ‘face’ appears twice, where it only appeared once in the text that is just above.

And all herb of the field before it was on the earth, and all the grass of the field before it sprang up, for he had not rained God on the earth, and a man was not to cultivate it. But a fountain rose up from the earth, and it watered all the face of the earth. And he formed God the man, dust from the earth. And he breathed into his face a breath of life, and the man became a living soul.

So, instead of God breathing into Adam’s nostrils, the Greek text has him breathing into his face. And you may think that this is not a big difference. At the heart of the matter is not an understanding of the ancient words of the text, whether they are in Hebrew or in Greek.

More important is the fact that, instead of thinking about some aspect of knowledge or how nice it would be to be upon the face of water somewhere while on vacation, eventually we have to stand before the face of the Creator. It seems that the translator takes this into account and emphasizes the face of the first important person, Adam. And, because of the problem of sin, a significant amount of ‘The Book’ will emphasize the person (or the incarnation) of the Second Adam (see Romans 5).